4. Who Do the Dead Belong to? Considering the (In)visibility of Death as an Outsider in France
I was at my parents’ house in Thika, Kenya, in July 2021 for one of my usual Sunday visits. As I stopped and got out of the car to open the gate, I saw that a few meters down the road, there were vehicles parked on both sides. They were parked in a way that suggested that the occupants were being hosted at one of our neighbors’ houses, whom I shall call Njambi. It was an unusual number of cars for a simple party on a Sunday; whatever it was, it was a significant function to draw this number of participants. My first thought had been a marriage ceremony, but those were hardly held on a Sunday. I asked my parents when I walked in if they knew what was going on at Njambi’s place. They had not heard anything yet, but my mum noted that the vehicles had been there since Friday evening and had continued to grow in number. As we continued to muse over what could be happening, my mother received a phone call from the neighbor living directly across the road from us. ’What do you mean?!?’ my mum shouted. Her whole demeanor changed. When she hung up, she reported that Njambi’s mother had died on Friday. The vehicles we saw outside their gate were mourners who had come to grieve with them. As I left later that evening, my mum told me she would go for the ’prayers’ at Njambi’s house. The prayers involved singing and praying, a sermon by a pastor or representative of the church, and then fundraising and deliberations on the funeral arrangements. It didn’t matter that COVID-19 was raging in the country and in Thika; this is what church members, neighbors, friends, and family did for and with a family that had lost a loved one.
Let me take you back to 2020 for a minute. I had been living in the third district of Marseille since October 2019, when I joined the Aix Marseille University as an Anthropology/Sociology PhD candidate through the project SALMEA: Self-Accomplishment and Local Moralities in East Africa. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out the following year, I was confined to my 15-meter-square studio on the eighth floor of a student residence. Despite seeing life on the street below me going on as normal, my phone was bombarded with news and figures that showed how dire humanity’s situation was. Part of France’s and the rest of the world’s daily routine was reporting a collective daily count of new infections and deaths. The numbers were shocking, 25,000+ new infections in one day and 1200+ registered deaths in France alone! And in the following days, the numbers would be higher before they came down.
I was terrified at how many people were dying, but wait a minute! Where were they dying? Why did I not see evidence of this extraordinary number of deaths in my residence or city home to over eight hundred thousand people?1 There was nothing unusual or out of place in the community around me, so who did the dead belong to? And were those people’s grief and mourning visible? Not where I lived. I was not denying the reported COVID-19 deaths; rather, I was curious that I had not seen any sign of it. I was also not sure what I was looking for or what it looked like. I half-expected the sound of people crying in neighboring buildings to waft through my open windows like it would if I was in Kenya. I did not see a collection of vehicles or a gathering of people here in the third district. There was a lockdown in place, and that may have been the reason. Yet, even in the months before the lockdown, I realized that death was invisible to me in Marseille.
’Do the reported COVID-19 deaths in France also include deaths in Marseille?’ I was unsure how to communicate my query to my PhD supervisor. I started by asking if people were dying in Marseille and saw the confusion on my supervisor’s face. We were having one of our regular calls via WhatsApp, which she made to check up on me; we could not meet physically due to the restrictions, and she knew that my socializing within my neighborhood and with work colleagues was limited because I could not speak French. I had become preoccupied with the apparent absence of evidence of death in the community around me. I was puzzled that it was invisible to me. In Kenya, I quickly realized, in contrast to what I was seeing in Marseille, death was experienced publicly by those who were bereaved and those around them. In the neighborhoods, there would be evidence of people congregating for the evening prayers—either the singing of hymns that drifted from the home to the street and neighboring homesteads or the swinging gate as people walked in and out of the home. It was also evident by the white tops of tents sticking above the fenced compound, betraying the shaded crowd that had gathered below. As with Njambi’s mother’s situation, the cars symbolized that something significant had happened. During my stay in Kenya in 2021, I remember being very aware of an increased death rate due to the significantly larger obituary section in the two main national newspapers. It was hard to ignore the funeral corteges that snaked through traffic, with the official videographer filming the entourage while sitting on one of the car doors with its window rolled down, and the hearse at the front leading mourners to the deceased’s final resting place. Each car in the entourage would be marked with a red ribbon around the side mirror, as was the norm. Death was visible in a way that it was not in Marseille.
Back in 2020 in Marseille, my supervisor offered some possible reasons why death was not evident or visible in my community. Apart from the fact that my residence was nowhere near a cemetery or funeral home (at least to my knowledge), my supervisor also reminded me that most COVID-related deaths were happening in hospitals. Hospital or health officials might have taken over the responsibility of burying the dead in accordance with the pandemic regulations. Burial attendance was also greatly restricted due to the pandemic; when allowed, it was limited to family members. This made sense, but it did not explain why I had not seen a hearse traversing the streets of Marseille or its highways. It left me asking how corpses were transported from hospitals to mortuaries or funeral homes and then to the burial grounds. My supervisor explained that she was probably not the best person to provide answers to my questions since she had not experienced death in the family for a long time and she was not privy to any such occurrence among her work colleagues and friends. Her experience was limited. So, my questions remained unanswered. I wish to restate the reason for my questions here: the number of daily deaths reported in media were, in my mind such a significant number that I expected the immediate social impact or reaction to be equally significant. In my view, the life cycle of death as a social event was incomplete. I had not seen or had probably missed the indicators of the deceased’s journey to their final resting place.
In September 2021, my mother passed away after being in the ICU for a month. Luckily, I was in Kenya since May of that year for fieldwork and deferred my return ticket at the end of August when she became ill and was hospitalized. I am grateful that I could spend time with her when she was healthy, visit and pray with her almost every day of her hospitalization, and finally be with family and friends as we mourned and buried her on her land just outside of Thika. A week before she died, I took my father for his check-up to the same hospital my mum was admitted. They had both been in the ICU, but he came out quickly and recovered his health completely. As I waited for him to finish up with his doctor, I sat down at the reception area with my laptop open, working on my fieldwork report that had a deadline, and determined whether I had received the payment for the fieldwork done in August. If I missed this deadline, I would have had to wait until the next month to receive my allowance, and would get it only if I submitted the report before the next month’s payroll was prepared. My expectation was that the individual in charge of the process (and with whom I was in contact) would process my allowance pending my report, which I would submit once my personal crisis was over. Perhaps this was an overstretch of my expectations, but I believed that it was an arrangement I should have been able to negotiate. But it wasn’t, and I needed the money, so I typed away in that reception room, waiting for my dad to come out so that I could take him to visit my mum in the ICU in the adjoining building.
A week later, my mother died. We buried her a week after her death. Before then, there were meetings every evening at my parents’ house. My mother’s pastors, fellow church members, former workmates, and fellow businesspeople attended the meetings every night along with relatives from far and wide. There was singing and prayers under a tent whose top you could see over the fence. And there were numerous cars parked outside the gate along the road. I did not attend the meetings; instead, I remained behind at my sister’s place, where I was staying for the duration of my mother’s illness and after her burial. I did not cry in public except at the funeral, where I cried freely as I read my tribute to my mother. But my tears and pain were hidden behind my sunglasses and the mandatory face mask. I drove myself to and from the funeral. My car did not have a red ribbon, and I was not part of the cortege that escorted my mother from the funeral home to her burial place. Despite the visible ways I saw other people handle the death of a loved one, my personal experience was invisible to members of my family, friends, and neighbors. Not absent but hidden. I am aware that the way my experience with death was not absent but probably invisible to others is the same way that the evidence of COVID-19 deaths in France was not absent but hidden to me.
A few days after the funeral, one of my French colleagues, a senior researcher, suggested that I return to Marseille. She thought it would be better for me to come back and distract myself with a different environment and with work. I was baffled. My mother had just died. The human that made sense of the world for me and had continued to define my existence (even now, in my forties) was gone. The ground under my feet had literally opened, and I was free-falling through life in shock and terror—and this person suggested that Marseille and my work may do me some good. Rather than being in a familiar, socially safe place with family and friends, this person believed it was better for me to be in Marseille where she knew I had no friends and couldn’t communicate with anybody because I didn’t speak French well. Also, the idea that I needed distraction from this earth-moving crisis baffled me: was there any way to escape the pain that came with the death of a loved one? I still feel angry when I think about this. And I still struggle to make sense of this suggestion because what does it say about how the person perceived my mother’s death and my loss? I find that this can lead me down a dark path because there are no good answers. Because I know her to be kind and generous, I reassure myself that she was trying to help. I do not think she was being deliberately insensitive or speaking out of malice. After all, people can be awkward when it comes to death. But at the back of my mind, I remembered the story a young Kenyan scientist shared at a friend’s graduation party of his experiences working with Europeans and North Americans. He shared how the human resources policy on death stipulated that staff could take three days off if they lost a loved one and two weeks off if they had lost a pet. We laughed at the time; we were sure he exaggerated much of his story to make us laugh. His point was that Europeans and North Americans are extremely individualistic, and kin or social relationships are not as important as they are to Kenyans. I know this is not necessarily true; however, when I consider my colleague’s suggestion, I wonder. Sometimes I wonder.
In most Kenyan institutions, one is entitled to about five days of compassionate leave to attend to the death of a family member. Additional days can be hived off one’s annual leave. Also, one may negotiate additional compassionate leave days if one must travel outside town to arrange and attend the burial. I knew how to negotiate the days I needed from a Kenyan institution. However, I realized that I had no idea what my employer’s policy was on compassionate leave at a French institution. Because I was already in Kenya for fieldwork for four months, I believe it was easier for me to stay on for an additional two months—that is, September and October. However, my contract does not allow me to be away from France for more than six months in a row, therefore I would have had to travel back to Marseille by the end of October. My supervisor, who has been my guardian angel in many ways, seemed to understand that I was not ready to come back and was contemplating deferring my studies. She advised me to apply for my annual leave, which would allow me to stay in Kenya until the end of the year. My leave request was quickly approved by the human resources official, who, in her email, also shared her condolences in one short sentence, ‘I am sorry about your mum’.
When my mother died, I half-expected that I would see an email about my loss circulated to my colleagues by the lab administration. I did not tell the lab administration. ‘But surely they must know about it?’, I thought to myself. My experience with the Kenyan institutions I worked in was that the human resources sent out an email to the entire staff to communicate a co-worker’s loss of a loved one. This allowed us not only to email out condolences and to contribute to the funeral expenses but also to appropriately welcome back the co-worker with a pole sana (Swahili expression for ‘very sorry’) and ’I’m praying for you and your family’ when they resumed. I was not expecting contributions, but I expected that when I got back, I would receive the French version of pole sana and ‘I am praying for you’. Was it that my colleagues did not know of my loss? Yet again, how were they supposed to know if I did not tell them? But how could they not know? I shared the news of my loss with two colleagues with whom I felt well acquainted enough to do so. It appeared that none of them shared it with the group. This has made me very curious about experiencing death in the workplace in France. I know that one of the two colleagues I had shared my news with is very reserved. She does not share her private life with the rest of the team; perhaps as an extension of her preferences for me, she kept my news private. Knowing my other colleague, it is possible that he shared the news with the department administrators. I can only speculate since I have not asked him about it. My own experience made me realize that during my time in the department, I had not seen a single email reporting the death of a colleague’s loved one. But I had seen emails that reported the death of a former colleague. I still do not know what to make of this—the interaction between a bereaved person and his or her workmates in Marseille—because it is also invisible to me.
My experience with the demand for my fieldwork report to get paid my allowance while I was crisscrossing hospital corridors, and the expectation of my French colleague that I would travel to Marseille two weeks after the funeral made me believe that I had to put aside the loss of my mother and go on as if nothing had happened. It was one of my mentors, a resident in the Netherlands, that insisted that I stay in Kenya until I was psychologically well to leave. She reminded me that I had gone through a difficult month of crisscrossing two counties (Nairobi and Kiambu county) while dealing with the hospitalization of both my parents. She validated the fatigue I felt both physically and mentally, cautioning me that I could still be recovering from that and had not fully comprehended my mother’s death. She alerted me that my stay in Kenya was not just for my sake but also for my sisters, who were younger than me and perhaps looked up to me as a figure of comfort. She demanded that I ask for a postponement of my thesis follow-up committee meeting, which was scheduled for the Tuesday after my mother’s burial. She assured me that the university would allow my late registration because these things happen. She was adamant. I truly appreciate what she did for me. I think she understood how intimidated I was by the French bureaucracy,2 which is often quite rigid and is daunting for an outsider who relies on Google Translate for most administrative and social communication. I believe she was also aware of the impact the perceived hierarchy between my French colleagues and me had on my assumptions and behavior. It helped that I had her as an ally, albeit in the shadows. She provided me an alternative voice and, specifically, a voice that could respond to the anxieties I had concerning what I saw as a rigid and hostile academic bureaucracy that I had trouble interacting with. I did as she advised. The thesis follow-up committee meeting was postponed by four weeks.
On reflection, I realize that the experience I detailed in the last four paragraphs was mostly my reaction to my imagination about what the French academic and work administration expected from me despite my bereavement. I was able to resolve the tensions concerning my university re-registration and my return to work and to Marseille. However, this would not have been possible without the intervention of mediators such as my French supervisor and my Dutch mentor, who were familiar with the workings of my institutions as well as my orientation, experiences, anxieties, and limitations. They not only mediated but also interpreted meanings for me—meanings that were often lost in communication via Google translations from French to English. They also explained or shed light on the cultural context and differences between my experiences and expectations and those of the people with whom I interacted. For example, I was not being offensive to my thesis follow-up committee members, whom I considered my seniors, by asking for our meeting to be postponed. Of course they would understand; were they not human too? Without the intervention of my mediators, I would have made decisions and done things I was not ready for, and probably my resentment towards my work and colleagues would have been unbridled, to the detriment of my studies. I am forever grateful to my supervisor, my mentor, and others who have been critical for my survival in Marseille as a Kenyan PhD student and a French resident. I cannot forget the British professor on sabbatical here in Marseille, who, together with his wife, met with me online once every month in 2020 and 2021 to help me navigate my first academic year and the separation from my family during the pandemic.
I am still curious about how the French experience death. I saw my first funeral home in France in the town that I now reside in, Cassis, just outside of Marseille. In the days I have passed it on my way to the big mall, I have only once seen a group of about ten people gathered outside as if coming from or waiting to enter the establishment. I contrast this with funeral homes in Kenya that are busy almost all days of the week except for Sunday and maybe Monday, evidenced by the crowds that gather to observe the remains of their loved ones moved from the morgue to the hearse and the long line of cars parked both inside and outside the compound and beside the road, waiting to form the funeral cortege. Back in Cassis, the bus I was in quickly passed by the funeral home, so I couldn’t make out if any of the people I saw had sad faces or were crying. I was curious about how they wore the experience of death on their faces. Perhaps they were looking for a kindred spirit in mourning like I was, unable to let go of their loved one, crushed by the terrible hand of death while trying to maintain a dignified posture.
It does feel like my contemplations about death in Marseille, triggered by the reported deaths at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, have come full circle for me. I was aware of but could not observe other people’s experiences with death in Marseille, and then I observed my friend and neighbor’s loss of her mother in Kenya. The circle was completed with my own experience of death and my encounter with French responses to my loss.
The experience of death is perhaps not what many readers would expect to find as the subject of a contribution to a book on the academic experiences of foreign scholars in Europe. Yet, death has been a global preoccupation since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has invaded our private spaces either through media or through our experiences and the experiences of those around us. In the paragraphs above, I have discussed my experience with death in the last three years, and shared some of my questions and reflections on the visibility and invisibility of death in my community in Kenya and in France. As Olga Burlyuk stated after reading a draft of my text, it is not that I am questioning whether the French mourn the dead; they do. My concern has been in the visible and invisible ways death is mourned. And in sharing my Kenyan neighbor’s loss, I relay the expectations I had vis-à-vis what I observed or did not observe in Marseille. In sharing my own loss, I not only show how I did not conform to my own expectations of a visible performance of the activities linked to the death of a loved one, but also how I struggled with my anxieties concerning the perceived expectations of my French academic community as I dealt with my loss. I understand that because my worldview is shaped by my experiences growing up in Kenya, my perception of attitudes and practices in other countries may betray strong biases. These are not meant to be offensive; they are simply reactions to encountering the unfamiliar and reflecting on them, based on my worldview. I have attempted to relay my experiences and reflections respectfully to the communities in Kenya and France. Where I have failed, I ask your forgiveness.
1 ‘Comparateur de territoires commune de Marseille (13055),’ Insee (L’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, September 22, 2022), https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1405599?geo=COM-13055.
2 The Oxford Learner’s dictionary defines bureaucracy as ‘the system of official rules and ways of doing things that a government or an organization has, especially when these seem to be too complicated’. I use the word here in this context.
© 2023, Norah Kiereri, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0331.04